What were your impressions about how CITyFiED interacts or compares to its peer projects?
Although our scope is slightly narrower than the H2020 ‘Lighthouse’ projects it is really nice to see how CITyFiED is proposing a methodology for city renovation at district level and a replication plan that could represent a very good starting point and a reference point for these newer projects. Our demonstration activities are very advanced and CITyFiED has proved a high performance in terms of social acceptance, providing other projects with very interesting and useful experiences. Furthermore, our monitoring strategy is line with the SCIS expectations and will be one of the first projects that will feed the SCIS database. CITyFiED is highly committed with the Smart Cities and Communities EU Standard and will participate in the Smart and Sustainable cities and communities co-ordination group at the end of June in Brussels, which could represent an important breakthrough in a meaningful coordination with existing initiatives. What did the event mean for CITyFiED and general development of the smart city space?
The event represented a very good opportunity to enhance our visibility and also to know more about the current development of other projects and problems that they are facing. CITyFiED and other projects should participate in such events, as the EIP SCC market place is an initiative supported by the European Commission bringing together cities, industry, SMEs, banks, research and other smart city actors. EIP SCC market place mainly represents a common place to join efforts when working on improving citizens’ quality of life, making cities more sustainable, competitive and better places to live in, replicability of the project results, and sharing experiences and knowledge to prevent mistakes being repeated. However, it is crucial to find a way that would allow the projects to be actively involved in the EIP SCC market place and action clusters. 7 July 2016 | What were your impressions about how CITyFiED interacts or compares to its peer projects?
CITyFiED already started in April 2014, meaning 8 months earlier than the first generation of H2020 Lighthouse smart cities projects (SCC1 2014) and one and a half year before the second generation of such projects (SCC1 2015). Despite its focus on energy efficiency and only few smart mobility actions in the demo sites, CITyFiED is doing quite well. It is more advanced in the development of common areas to all of those projects such as the definition of monitoring and evaluation KPIs, the set-up of an overall monitoring platform on top of the three demo site platforms, the definition of business cases and the development of flexible business models, the development of a holistic methodology for district retrofitting (from planning to implementation) as well as the development of a replication framework model. CITyFiED also disposes of a unique replication community of 11 cluster cities and 40 observer cities and is already very well networked - for instance through its participation in the My Smart City District initiative. CITyFiED therefore very well compares to its H2020 smart cities projects and should network with the 7 running SCC1 projects to join forces and develop common replication, exploitation, dissemination and communication actions. What did the event mean for CITyFiED and general development of the smart city space?
The event gives a great opportunity for enhanced visibility of the CITyFiED project, for its peer projects and for important policy actors of the field of smart cities. The EIP-SCC market place may serve as a platform to capitalize on the knowledge and experience of smart cities project to centralize, analyze and eventually publish the lessons learned from all those projects, as well as disseminate the specific solutions developed to face the smart city transformation challenge. The actual challenge is however now to find the right balance between the project contractual work and synergies with fellow smart city projects, meaning also finding the balance between the freedom to create unique smart city solutions and the necessity to join forces and align strategies to reach the necessary threshold for large scale replication of smart cities actions and large scale market deployment of economically viable smart city solutions. The coordination shall come as an initiative of the coordinators of the actual smart city projects, as already initiated by the SCC1 2014 project coordinators. A successful networking and collaboration of EC funded smart cities project will enable them to reach a higher quality and a much larger impact at European scale and beyond. Despite the fact that CITyFiED is a FP7 funded project, it can be seriously considered by its sister H2020 projects for networking and future collaborations. We hope this interaction can act to ensure the sustainability of CITyFiED solutions and their wide scale deployment. |